John Thomas Allen is a 37 year old poet who has poems in two journals that are coming out soon.  He hopes to finish a series of prose poems about the origin of “The Marvelous” before the end of the year.  He would encourage anyone to viciously criticize Donald Trump whenever and wherever they feel like doing it.

I Am Not

“I want my son to grow rich and successful through the pursuit of science”–Rimbaud

I am not the Nesquik tourniquet wired to a sucrose image

factory in Dorian Grey’s commodified purple parlor. 

I am not a miniaturist’s sample or his toys

frosted in a lunar dumbwaiter, my eye in it.

I am not the Greek choral fugue,

the occult order’s recorded applause.

I am not a sour patch kid with ingots in my eyes.

I am the monk’s cell in a red birdhouse,

initials carved in Aramaic graffiti,

music from a shepherd’s flute.

I am not Norman Rockwell’s smile

Tea stains, a bad back, and Oppenheimer 

always about to approach.

I am not the auroral stache

on Jarry’s self portrait.

I do not have to ^/—, text, or rhyme.

I am not a filed dream cube

secretly placed as cinemascopic

larvae subtitles seen crawling 

in the blind man’s brain, his first glimpse

a gathering of flies on the mad optometrist’s 

      3D test sheet.

I am also not Gumby’s smile, slowly protruding

drenched in room key digits, 

half mirror and half street gold

drooling in alchemical numbers, 

Pokey’s sect and code to his private parties.

I am not the fat stuntman in the ventilation system

suspended in the vent during 

first minute of imaginal entropy   

of my life or a coptic MISSING poster

framed in pyrite gold.

I am not a carousel of trick mirrors.

Don’t read this and call it yourself.

I am not the T Square

of ocean light

trailing the dead poet 

home in a casket of water.

I am not the arid cyclops ballerina

standing on one sea blue porch

playing star notes on a crooked spine.

I am not a mouth full of cuckoo clocks.

I am not the Wendigo’s dowsing prayer,

though my cement prayer hands still love

That Which Should Not Be.

I am not the sound the man makes

In peeling bells his insane ideal self,

his catechistic bird index stutters

every fifteen minutes

looking out on the world

in constellates of howling glass zebras,

dislocated howls flooding the city’s streets.

I am an idiot’s frightful pun,

De La Mare’s daily walk ablaze with howls,

a suddenly missing mustache

a peony pearl wishbone

LogoPoetics: Towards a Marvelous Prayer

You wake and woke and upon waking stillness

through and through always still waking corridors,

You are dreamt and upon dreaming the mad

mage’s exile 

the Hour of the Wolf crows,

and your freedom sown

In the bodiless mesmerist’s occult codex 

burns with ciphers and hexes.      

The mad mage’s exile, his search for the seraphim’s 

holy word.

In sandblasted times, there are books, bouquets

of eyelids peeled from sundials in greater need 

of sight. There is a deep bone song, the doldrum’s

rattle and dawning rod, the pure manque,

on the horseman’s incorruptibility

sounds a dawning ore of morphia jazz.

His eyes spun with dilatory decoys,

palm upwards, stroked with ash anagrams 

and Indian feathers, The Hand of the Left Path

will grasp for you, fingers fat with rings. 

The dumbwaiter’s shift, lunar plate glass

The anteroom’s angled moon parlor glare,

His body without organs 

Carried away in measured pounds

Cut with codes by the Doctors

His pair of eyes spilled in the corner

split in howling octave 

   howling aeons of clipping shade

You will wake to hear

an echo of night’s abandoned chamber music,

the guitar beat’s lead voodoo, 

the Wendigo’s eldritch prayer 

the grove, pinched flames 

in the burning tears of stiff scarecrows,

Hollowed eyes bonding in empurpled cold.

Behold the artificial kingdoms beatified 

by marigold borders of maenad imaginal entropy

You will first be a star faced novitiate,

an inductee, the initiate, a darkroom’s denizen.

Let the demonologue’s dialect begin, 

                      O Mouth of Shadows 

utter the Word

in broken murmurs, fractured shades. 

Remember

Time zones split in lollygagging fractions, 

         Racoon deliriants fire off like mortar shells

from ice cream cones,

A shadow becomes a theater curtain,

white space an enroaching eon. 

These Lost Steps creep backwards

        Our derealized encephalitics have arrived to build 

your obsidian museums with gratitude

for incantatory incousiance, for good things,

for A World In a Kiss

For These Carnival Things Always For The First Time, Always

           Let the Saturnine Night

           fall as the rorschach box

           fall as fountain tears from a manque’s cheeks.

           Le Momo’s galleries sifting as sand in time

   Primitives weaving astral hydrangea in moon

     kissed soil, the march of nighttime’s seal;

   nightmare root.

  Let the Order of Bergson’s Memory Dial spin,

  tin in the radial light of dilated time

          the stitched ephemera quilted in linearity’s

          inattention, the poet a chimera in memory’s

                      spilling as an easel yet in stasis.

           Let the Order of the Satin Moon unfurl

  on the dark porch woman, 

her bamboo body

  wooden hands rotating

starfish crown wig, 

sudden eyes seized in crosshatches 

of consensual conditioning, ore only harvested 

    for stars, language coding instinct

, 

                  sealed in extremities,

shifting back and forth in the binding 

spandex age slips under the skin. 

These Lost Steps knock toward you

The Sewing of Echoes

                                     And Here Is The Order of the Novalis Star

                            Let her have the Hour of the Blue Flower

      Christabels ring, the fitful alterations 

  of sealed nights deep in settling

      stomachs, the moon genuflects

                in the Grandfather clock’s gold plated

                                seal, writ upon by idle ghosts. 

      Sacred ground holds Sophia, a Novalis

star weeps. A hidden wisdom, earth, Eros’ 

nucleus.  

Let the Order of Artaud’s Black Star Begin

Room at Rodez:colloidal doorknob, pulsing like a razor 

                      angled membrane, still with absolute coma acuity, 

                      eyes annihilating diamonds rolling in seismic shock,

       eclictic orbs, room filled with larvae plumes, smoke

notes in the tapeworm’s open body smeared with  

smoke notes.

                           Semaphoric bird, semiotic thorazine shuffles, spiritual  

                          daughters, barbed stars in a black orchard’s bursting            

        fissions of jade fireflies, paranoiac  blue hours,

                        laudanum ouroboros, hatchling rebirth  

without organs, marred by dream’s muted seal, 

                             pinned agitations of Balinese puppetry: 

                        abandoned quiet room’s hours of tuneless aqua, styrofoam rocks.     

                        Each sigil serrated with the  signaling in pulse, paid blowdarts at dawn 

                      dissolute of possible orders. Artaud keeps Fourier’s fecal stars in a Cisa Mystica. 

                          Vulpine nocturnes spat from a sewage pipeline forming a maze in a dark poet’s

                      rentless tomb; this to celebrate earth’s grinding nightmare tropics, the body above all.